It's been a busy last couple of weeks for this blogger. I've continued in learning and using my Esperanto, for better or for worse, and it's hard to keep it together amidst all of the classes I'm taking, the things I'm trying to do to relax, and oh-good-God-I-have-a-week-to-memorize-a-bunch-of-music (workshop run by my voice teacher).

I've also had interesting developments in the multicultural-interaction department. There's a happy and a crappy, so I'll start with the crappy and get it out of the way.

Crappy: Flirtatious Brazillian

One of the great things about the lernu! site is that it fosters communications and friendships between people of different countries and cultures. Within a few days of my joining the site, I received a message from a member, which simply read "Hello!" in Esperanto. I responded, saying "Hi, my name's [name], what's yours?" After a long while, several weeks, the user responded, and I took a moment to check out their profile. Ah, he was a Brazillian! This is exciting.

We've been corresponding off-and-on for a couple of weeks, now, and as I sort-of anticipated, Mr. Brazil started getting... flirtatious. Fairly subtle, too, like calling me "My dear". Having had a previous experience on the site already with a guy who got fairly forward (note: my age is not posted on my profile), I was suspicious, but not overly so.

Then, Mr. Brazil said it: "Do you have Skype? I like you."

Commence cringing. My mother had warned me that a Brazilian man would be more forward, but I wasn't expecting this kind of forward. The best plan of attack was to immediately cool off. He hasn't contacted me all week. Yay?

Happy: Cute French Guy

I'll say it now: I love swing-dancing. It's fun, it's flirty, and it's a great thing to do with one's friends. The other day, I went to the monthly swing dance at a community center in a nearby city, where I met up with a bunch of buddies from church. One of my friends, Mia, had specifically requested my presence, because she happened to have a certain French exchange student for a few weeks, and she had brought him along. Apparently, I'm the only person she knows who speaks French.

Needless to say, I used this to my advantage a bit. I followed Mia's "No flirting" rule, but I still had fun with Mr. Dijon. ;) Specifically, I taught him to dance. In French.

Evening made? I think so. He was highly attractive. And he wore a v-neck t-shirt (v-necks on guys are very attractive to me, okay?).

Bonus!

Another happy recently! I'm in a video announcing the viewer takeover of the DIY fashion website, Threadbanger. The idea of the site is that it's part online TV channel, part community. Unfortunately, the hosts of the two main TV shows were FIRED (I don't know why). Upset, devastated, confused, a few of us regular contributors to the forums (including many a moderator) decided to band together and take over the site in our own way, producing our own tutorial videos. I am officially in two of the videos (one's been posted, one's coming soon), and I plan on making several tutorials to share when I have a few hours to myself.

Go ahead and check out the video! I'm so excited to be lumped together with such creative people.

After my wakeup call during my last post, I've gotten back in the groove of studying Esperanto fairly regularly. This is a very good thing, considering that I found out that if a person were to study Esperanto for ten minutes a day, in four months they'd be essentially fluent.

You have no idea how exciting that sounds to a lingvemulo like me. After three years of studying French, I am definitely not at a level of fluency where I can confidently communicate with a native speaker at all, or even discuss abstract topics with a fellow student.

Alas, I've been trying to do some more studying (whilst my parents watch Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland), but the stupid Lernu! site is down. I go to the page and it's blank except for: "Ŝajne estas iuj problemoj pri la datumbazo, bv. reveni pli poste." I think this means that there's some problems with the server and that I should return later.

Well, shoot.

What's all this about... books?

*spazz* Igotnewbookstoday!! :D

A fantastic bookstore in Seattle, Elliott Bay Book Co., had changed locations since my family was last there, so today after work we decided to go check out the new place and get some reading material. Despite having to walk past the large, brightly-colored SEX section to get to the good stuff (Philosophy, Women's and LGBT Studies, Linguistics, etc.), I had a ton of fun poking around. I bought this fantastic thing called In the Land of Invented Languages. There's a whole section in here on the history of Esperanto, so I'm starting with that, and then I'll read the rest of the book. I want to put up an excerpt which I found deep and highly amusing at the same time:

Still, it is not hard to understand why so many people find Esperanto so repellent. Language is not just a handy tool for packing up our thoughts and sending them along to others. It's an index to a set of experiences both shared and extremely personal... We love our languages for this... Compared with them, Esperanto is an insult... It asks us to give up what distinguishes us from the rest of the world for something that makes everyone in the world the same... Strange, then, that I don't think I've ever been anywhere more colorful than Esperantoland. On my second trip there... I was exposed to so much culture that I started to get a headache. We sang "Guantanamera" in Esperanto on ten separate occasions in ten different Cuban musical styles.

And with this, I'd like to segue into something that caught my attention a few days ago...

ANTI-ESPERANTO SENTIMENT

Crazy, huh? This goes beyond "It's ugly" (any language can be considered ugly...) and into "...Esperanto -- it's been tried, and it FAILED. Esperanto is a DEAD language, with a few wingnuts who insist it's some kind of 'perfect' solution. It's not, it's not even a LANGUAGE -- it's gibberish... Esperanto is an abysmal failure. If it were at all successful, it would be spoken by more than just a handful of self-righteous linguistic pricks. In fact, Esperanto was REJECTED by the world."

Someone actually wrote that on a blog post on http://www.change.org/. The original post wasn't even about Esperanto, but with debates about language usage and communication erupting in the comments section, this person contributed their harsh two cents.

My first question is: What on Earth did a language do to earn such violent commentary? Jeez, I haven't seen such a response since someone suggested that maybe it was okay to address Mexican immigrants in Spanish.

Second of all, I wanted to address specific points made by this person, in the hopes that any present or future readers here will better understand my madness.

1.) "...Esperanto-- it's been tried, and it FAILED." Now, then, is it really fair to say that a language has failed when it's still growing, and more speakers are coming all the time... and it's not even 200 years old?2.) "It's not even a LANGUAGE-- it's gibberish..." So too is any language which cannot be understood by a listener. But more than that, if Esperanto is gibberish, it's the darn most organized gibberish I've ever seen. Being so nitpicky to ensure that all nouns end in "o" and all adjectives end in "a"? Jeez, Zamenhoff, you're a little OCD.3.) "If it were at all successful, it would be spoken by more than just a handful of self-righteous linguistic pricks." Now, see here, besides the fact that two million is not "a handful" in any sense of the term, I see nothing self-righteous or prick-y about being interested in language. It's just part of being a linguist... okay, you're accurate there. A lot of people who speak Esperanto are linguistic-types, because they're language nerds. Like me. It's fun.

Are you gonna go into another full-blown rant?

Nah, I'm not really in the mood. I just wanted to respond without opening a massive can of worms.

That's the problem with a website geared towards debate and action. You get people who are willing to debate you into the ground.